Left – Stephen Multari and Josh Anderson. Cover – Josh Anderson. Photos – Kate WilliamsThe marvellous Maggie Dence behind a fence in fine feline form plays the titular tiger in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo.
In Rajiv Joseph’s powerful play, the Baghdad Zoo has been zapped in the American invasion of Iraq, with various exhibits escaping captivity, including a pride of lions.
The tiger is still caged, prowling, growling, under guard by a couple of US grunts.
Brim full of braggadocio after bagging Baghdad, one of the infantile infantrymen, Tom, taunts and teases the tiger, who retaliates by tearing off the soldier’s hand.
The tiger is shot dead by the other GI, Kev, but remains as a posthumous narrator for the remainder of the play, a wry and wise observer of the conflict.
Posthumous performances litter Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, mostly in the form of former exhibits, animals made extinct from the war, but also from Kev, who gave the tiger trigger mortis and then succumbed to PTSD, and also the ghost of Uday Hussein, pottily fixated with golden guns and toilet seats.
Of the characters still alive, Musa, Uday Hussein’s former gardener who finesses his American idiom by watching The Fast and Furious franchise, acts as a US military interpreter. He has to negotiate a hand job for amputee Tom from an Iraqi hooker because the tiger has taken his preferred tug paw. Apparently there’s a lot of muscle memory in the metacarpus concerning male masturbation.
The play veers into verbosity at times, but the cast do well in corralling it, led by the Dence’s philosophising feline phantom, a big cat concerned with big questions and Andrew Lindqvist’s bemused, confused and frustrated Musa.
Isabel Hudson’s simple but effective set is centred by a cyclone fence rent asunder, subtly augmented by Benjamin Brockman’s lighting.
Director Claudia Barrie quotes from Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer in her Director’s Note – “Most hearts were so fatigued they ran away from their bodies leaving caves where beasts sleep”. It’s a sentence redolent of the sentiment and symbolism of the play
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo truly earns its stripes as one of the should see shows of the Old Fitz season.
Mad March Hare, in association with Red Line Productions presents
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
by Rajiv Joseph
Directed by Claudia Barrie
Venue: Old Fitz Theatre, 129 Dowling St (Cnr Cathedral St), Woolloomooloo
Dates: 12 April – 16 May 2017
Bookings: www.redlineproductions.com.au
